Santori Reloaded, page 7
part #3 of Santori Series
I nodded. “Okay.”
“So you’re going to be all right if I go back there and check on things? I need to make sure everyone knows to let you stay by his side whenever possible.”
I nodded, and he patted my arm and stood to go.
“Thanks,” I said, staring down at my hands in my lap. “And Gio… he’s my husband. Not legally, but—” I twisted my wedding band. “But he is.”
Brian smiled gently. “I wish both of you the best,” he said. “And you take care of yourself. Remember, you did everything perfectly.”
Tears sprang to my eyes, and I nodded, though I didn’t like the sound of his words. Somehow, it sounded like he was preparing me for bad news.
Chapter 7
PETER
Hours later, after the sun had started to set, I was standing in a room in the ICU staring down at Gio. He looked so unlike himself I almost thought for a moment that I was in the wrong room. A dark-haired male nurse leaned over him, doing something with the tube that ran from Gio’s mouth to a machine beside his bed.
Eerie sounds filled the room. Breathing sounds that reminded me of Darth Vader. Rhythmic beeps that sounded like a heartbeat.
Gio’s breaths. Gio’s heart. It was disconcerting to hear them translated by machines and thrust out into the room.
“He’s just come up from surgery,” the nurse said. “My name’s Alan, by the way. I’ll be taking care of Mr. Rivera tonight.”
“I’m Peter.” I reached out awkwardly and shook Alan’s hand. “Did they fix the problem? Can he talk now?”
“He’s still sedated,” Alan said, inspecting the tube that stretched from Gio’s arm to an IV bag. “We’ll know more when the meds wear off.”
“How long will that be?”
“Hmmm… shouldn’t be too long now. Less than an hour.”
“And then he’ll be okay? How long before he can go home?”
Alan ignored my question and studied one of the machines beside the bed. The monitor that showed Gio’s heartbeat. There were all kinds of numbers and letters on the screen, and I didn’t understand a single one of them.
“His temperature is too high,” Alan said, almost to himself.
“How bad is that?” I asked, trying not to notice how incredibly pale Gio had become. How his skin had bleached out to the color of paper, and his lips were cracked around that tube. “Does that thing go all the way down his throat?”
“Yes. And the other end is attached to the ventilator.” He indicated the intimidating machine. “It’s breathing for him.”
My own breath hung up in my throat. “What? He can’t breathe on his own?”
“They intubate patients during surgery,” Alan said. “When the meds wear off, we’ll know more, but right now, I need to do something about his temperature.”
“What are you going to do? Give him Tylenol?”
Alan left the room without giving an answer, and I moved into the spot he had occupied at Gio’s bedside. I reached out a tentative hand and placed it on top of Gio’s. It was the first time I’d dared to touch him, and even now I was wary. For some reason, I didn’t want Alan to come back in and find me touching him. It felt like maybe I was breaking some unspoken rule.
In fact, it almost seemed that this man in the bed wasn’t Gio at all. Suddenly, he was a stranger, and the right I had enjoyed with him for years—the right to touch him whenever I wanted and in myriad intimate ways—was gone as if it had never been.
I wanted to cry. How could I feel this way about the man I loved?
“Gio,” I said quietly, slipping my index finger beneath his palm. “Gio, can you hear me?”
“You’re going to need this,” Alan said as he bustled back into the room carrying a thin white blanket.
I jumped away from the bed and shoved my hands behind my back.
Alan tossed the blanket onto one of two chairs on the other side of the room near the foot of Gio’s bed, then pulled the covers off of Gio’s body, revealing a faded white-and-green hospital gown that rode too high on his thighs. Yet another tube snaked out from beneath the gown.
“What’s that tube for?” I asked.
Alan pointed to a clear plastic bag hanging from the side of the bed. “He’s got a catheter. This catches his urine.”
“Oh.” The bag was half full of the stuff, and it looked awfully dark to me.
Alan patted Gio’s chest gently, obviously more comfortable with touching him than I was. “Okay, I need to go call the doctor. You should get some rest on the sofa bed if you can.” The contraption he indicated looked more like a chair, but he wrestled with it until the back lowered, creating a flat surface.
I eyed the thing skeptically, almost wishing for the futon I’d spent my teenage years sleeping on.
Alan pulled a flat pillow out of a storage closet and tossed it onto the makeshift bed. “I’ll just be right outside the door if you need me.”
“O—okay,” I said to Alan’s retreating back.
I lowered myself to the chair bed and sat, unsure of what to do with myself. Gio was asleep, Alan was gone, and there was no way I was going to get any rest. After about twenty minutes, when the room began to feel like the North Pole, I pulled the blanket around myself. It didn’t help much.
I sat for about an hour, watching and shivering as Alan hurried in and out of the room. Other people came in. One fiddled with the ventilator for a while, and another emptied the urine bag. No one spoke to me beyond a curt nod or a murmured hello.
Then Gio coughed. It was a strained sound, that echoed in the tube that was jammed down his throat.
I jumped up and rushed to his side. “Gio? Can you hear me?”
He coughed again but seemed oblivious to my presence.
“Talk to me, Gio. Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
I pressed my right palm against his left, not grasping his hand. Just a whisper of a touch. “Can you hear me, Gio?”
His fingers threaded through mine, and he squeezed my hand once before his body spasmed with a violent string of coughs. The machine that did the breathing for him started alarming, and I jumped back, terrified I’d done something to harm him.
Gio’s eyes flew open, and he seemed to stare at me for a moment. But his eyes were all wrong. The right one was popped out and seemed to have a mind of its own, turning impossibly far and looking at me across his nose while the left one remained sunken and lifeless. That eye pinned me in place with something that looked far too much like accusation.
I started to cry.
Alan rushed into the room to discover Gio coughing yet again. “He’s getting agitated. Trying to get that tube out of his throat.”
“Can we take it out now?” I sobbed. “I think it’s really upsetting him.”
“Not yet. The doctor needs to check him in the morning, and we’ll go from there. It worries me that he’s not responding to us.”
“He held my hand just now,” I managed to say through my tears.
“Did he?” Alan grabbed onto Gio’s right hand. “Mr. Rivera, can you squeeze my hand?”
He asked it several times, but Gio never did. He had another coughing fit, though, and the machine went crazy, sending my anxiety through the roof. I covered my ears.
Alan silenced the alarm on the machine, then frowned. “He’s not responding.”
“But he’s moving. And he held my hand. I swear. Just…take that thing out of his throat.”
Alan frowned at me, annoyed, and then his expression softened. “He’s just fighting the tube, Peter. It’s a common thing. I’m going to have to give him a little something to ease him or else he’ll keep fighting it.”
“You’re going to knock him out? He’s just starting to wake up.”
“Did you see any movement at all on the right side?” Alan asked.
“I don’t know,” I wailed. “Why is this happening? He had surgery. Didn’t that fix it?”
“He’s had a stroke, Peter. There were three blood clots in his brain. The surgeon was able to remove two, but not the other. All we can do now is monitor him and hope his brain doesn’t start swelling. The surgeon will check him first thing in the morning.”
I returned to the hard chair bed and sat down, resting my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. Tears fell from my eyes and hit the floor. I could feel it happening, but I couldn’t see anything through the watery blur.
“Gio,” I whispered.
I think that was the moment reality came crashing down on me. Gio was not going to suddenly snap out of this and be able to go home in a few days. Something was very, very wrong.
Alan came close and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Is there anyone you can call, Peter? You shouldn’t be going through this all alone. Don’t you and your father have some other family who can come up here?”
My father. Ha. I wanted to laugh out loud. I wanted to scream, He’s my husband, you fucking asshole.
Instead, I just sniffed back the tears as best I could and said, “Theo.”
“Give me his number, and I’ll call after I give Mr. Rivera something to calm him.”
Alan left the room and returned with a slip of paper and a pen.
After a moment of searching my addled brain, I came up with Theo’s pager number and wrote it on the paper with a shaky hand. It hadn’t occurred to me to call anyone. This had all just seemed too personal. But Alan was right. If I didn’t talk to someone soon, I was going to lose my mind.
Alan slipped the paper and pen into the pocket of his scrubs and set about getting Gio sedated. It didn’t take long before the room quieted, and Gio’s assisted breaths evened out. The coughing had stopped, and his eyes were closed.
He still moved every now and then, and surely that was a good sign. It gave me hope, even though the movements were confined to his left side. But after a while of just staring at him and cataloging every twitch and shift he made, I started to notice something strange.
The movements were like a pattern. He raised his left arm and bent his left knee at the same time, and then they would slowly relax. It reminded me of those startled movements that happened to me sometimes when I was falling asleep. Maybe that’s what was going on with Gio. He was startling awake, but the medication kept him from becoming fully conscious.
When everything was quiet except the machines, and I could tell it was the dead of night, I crept over to Gio’s bedside. I slipped my hand into his and whispered, “Gio, can you hear me?”
There was no response.
I leaned down and said softly right next to his ear, “I love you, Gio. I love you so much. Please wake up.”
Still no response. His arm lifted, and his knee bent, and then they gradually relaxed back down onto the bed.
I rested my head on his shoulder, feeling the too-rhythmic rise and fall of his chest as that machine forced air into his lungs. “Please don’t die, Gio. I can’t live without you, don’t you know that? You’re my everything.”
Gio remained silent and completely still. Tears dripped from my eyes and landed on his chest, wetting the faded hospital gown that countless other people had worn in this place.
He shouldn’t have been wearing such a shabby piece of clothing. He should have been in his suit, with his hair slicked back and his stubble groomed perfectly. His eyes should have been smoldering with that blue fire that my touch always sparked.
And they should have been the same size. Jesus. They shouldn’t have been all crazy and—
I whimpered against his shoulder, and a new torrent of tears rushed out.
“Gio…” I whispered frantically. “Gio, wake up.” I pulled away from him and shook his shoulder gently, then with more force when there was no reaction.
My mind raced with the need to get something from him. Anything. Even if it was that look of accusation in his one protruding eye.
I lowered the bed rail and grabbed his hand, careful not to disturb the IV. I flattened his palm against my abdomen and moved it back and forth in a caress.
“Do you feel that, Gio? It’s me. Peter. Your good boy, remember? Your sweet pea.” My voice was steadily gaining in volume, and I didn’t sound much like myself. I sounded like a stranger who had lost his mind. A stranger who was desperate and scared.
Gio’s arm tensed, nearly extracting his hand from my grasp, and his knee drew up. For one bright moment, I thought, This is it! He’s waking up.
But then his muscles relaxed again, excruciatingly slowly, and his limbs sank back down to the bed.
I started babbling then. “Come on, daddy. Wake up. I need you, okay? I’ve been such a bad boy, and I need you to—” I let out a pitiful, wet sob and keened low in my throat. My body started to sway just a little bit, and I moved Gio’s hand lower so that the backs of his knuckles brushed the waistband of my shorts. “Should I dance for you? There’s no one around but us, Gio. Just open your eyes and watch me. Come on, daddy. You love to watch me, remember? I know you don’t feel well, but you wouldn’t even have to do anything. Just open your eyes and look at me. Pleeeese…”
Not even a twitch of a response.
I was dimly aware of a sound, high-pitched and broken, and for a few seconds, I thought it was an alarm on one of Gio’s machines. Then Theo was there, slipping an arm around my shoulders, and I realized the sound was coming out of me.
“Hush, Pete. Hush.” He enfolded me against his chest, and he smelled of cigarettes and liquor, and I melted. Would have crumpled to the floor if he hadn’t held me up.
“Theo,” I squeaked.
“Hush now, I’m here. I’ve got you.”
The arms weren’t as strong and warm as Gio’s, but they were something.
Theo walked me over to the chair bed and lowered me onto it. I was shaking now. Trembling so hard my bones were clattering. Or was that my teeth? Yes, my teeth.
“S-s-so cold,” I whispered.
Theo pulled the thin hospital blanket around me. “There. Is that better?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I can’t w-wake him up.”
“It’s okay, Pete,” he soothed.
“N-n-no. It’s not.” I glanced up at Gio in time to catch his arm and leg settling back down onto the bed. “That same goddamn movement,” I said. “Th-that’s all he’ll do. We need to get that thing out of his throat. He hates it. He’ll f-feel better if we can just—”
I made a move to rise, but Theo held me firmly to the chair.
“Hey,” he called out. “Hey, nurse, we need you in here.”
Alan came into the room, his eyes wide. He looked at Gio, who was still the same as he had been all night, then to Theo and me. “What is it?”
“Pete’s freaking out. We need some blankets or something. He’s freezing to death.”
Alan grabbed another blanket from storage and wrapped it around me.
“M-more,” I said.
He retrieved another and wrapped it around the other two. “Is that better?”
I shook my head, still shivering violently.
“He’s in shock,” Alan said.
Theo rubbed his hands briskly over my shoulders through three layers of blanket. “Can we give him something?”
“No,” I shouted, trying to get up again. “I don’t n-need anything. We just— We have to get that tube out of his throat. He can’t wake up with that thing choking him. He’ll be okay if we can get it out of him.”
“You hold him still,” Alan said to Theo. “I’ll call the doctor.”
Theo did as Alan instructed, holding me in place and murmuring soft words that did nothing to calm the storm raging inside me. I needed to get to Gio and—
And what?
“He needs to see me,” I said. “If he can just get that thing out of him and look at me, he’ll remember. He doesn’t want to leave me. He just…can’t see right now. I can get him out of this. He loves me, Theo. He wouldn’t leave me.”
Alan came back a short time later and handed me a pill and a bottle of water. “The doctor ordered something for you. It will help calm you down.”
“I don’t want to calm down,” I said. “Gio needs me.”
Alan shoved the pill at me. “You’re no good to him in this state. He needs you clear-headed and calm. You want to do what’s best for him, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, this is what’s best for him.”
Theo took the pill from Alan and held it out toward me with his thumb and forefinger. “Open up, Pete. Gio would want you to take this.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yes. Now open wide.”
I opened my mouth, and Theo placed the pill on my tongue. Then he took the bottle of water from Alan and pressed it into my hand. “Drink up, Santorini. Make that pill disappear.”
I almost smiled at the nickname I hadn’t heard in ages. The pill got hung up in my throat for a moment, and I gagged, but eventually I worked it down with the water. Then I finished off the entire bottle. I hadn’t realized I was so damn thirsty.
“How long has it been since you ate?” Theo asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t eat.” The mere thought of it made me want to puke.
“Okay, we’ll worry about that later. Right now, you need to get some rest.” To Alan, he asked, “Has he slept at all?”
Alan shrugged. “I have no idea, but from the looks of him, I would say no.”
“I don’t need to eat, and I sure as hell don’t need to sleep. What if Gio wakes up? I need to be the first thing he sees. What if he doesn’t know I’m here?”
“He’ll know,” Theo said. “I’ll be sure to tell him.”
Chapter 8
PETER
My next memory was of Theo waking me to find that the sun had come up, and the doctor was in the room. He had silver hair and a craggy face, and he looked tired.
I bolted upright and smoothed my hair. My brain felt foggy, and my muscles were sore. I stood on shaky legs and faced the doctor.
